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Holocaust victim Anne Frank would have likely been a Justin Bieber “belieber”: Porter

Anne Frank likely would have been a “Belieber,” Catherine Porter writes.

Justin Bieber performs in Zurich, Switzerland, on March 22. Bieber was hit by a firestorm of indignation and outrage after he wrote a comment in the guest book at the historic Anne Frank House in the Netherlands that he visited on Friday. (Walter Bieri / The Associated Press)

Anne Frank is seen in an undated photo sitting at her desk in the Amsterdam apartment where she began her diary before going into hiding from the Nazis. Frank started her diary in the apartment at Merwedeplein in southern Amsterdam in June 1942, weeks before disappearing into the secret annex of a canal-side warehouse in the city during the German occupation in the Second World War. (HO / REUTERS)

She was 15. She liked movie stars and cute boys. She would have loved to go to a crowded stadium and dance and sing to Justin Bieber’s music, had she not been locked up in a warehouse annex with seven other people, hiding from the Nazis.

That’s the power of Anne Frank’s journals, isn’t it?

I reread The Diary of a Young Girl Monday, while the Internet unleashed on Justin Bieber. He was either maniacally self-centred, delusionally naïve, or incredulously ignorant for writing in the Anne Frank House museum’s guest book that “Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a Belieber.”

How dare he hijack her tragic fame for his own aggrandizement! Was he making light of the Holocaust, by comparing her to a heartsick fan? Didn’t he realize she was much bigger than any Belieber!

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They’ve got a point: If we were going to dream up “hopefullys” for Anne Frank, there are a few front-runners ahead of loving Justin Bieber.

Like not being betrayed and reported to the Gestapo, shoved into a cattle car for Auschwitz and then transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died from typhus, just weeks before the end of the Second World War. “Hopefully,” she would have survived and built that big, important life she dreamed of, peeking out at the Amsterdam rooftops beyond her window. Or “hopefully,” she would have lived a small, precious life, with no greatness beyond friends and a job and some children and the odd night out at the movies that she loved, which is what most of us have and often forget how great it is.

But, putting that aside, I’d like to join the museum in defending Bieber. Inadvertently, he touched on the power of her haunting legacy:

Before her family went into hiding, Anne Frank was a typical teenage girl.

She rode her bike to school. She joined a ping pong club. She was outgoing and saucy and popular. “I have a throng of admirers who can’t keep their adoring eyes off me,” she wrote in one of the first entries in the diary her father had given her as a gift for her 13th birthday.

The diary is the first thing she packed, the night before her family went into hiding a few weeks later, in July 1942. The second things were curlers.

We often think of Holocaust victims as black-and-white photocopies of ourselves. They were simply frightened and cowed, or resilient and brave. Anne Frank reminds us they were teenage girls, longing for a first kiss, worried about passing their exams. They were just like us.

Even trapped in a small annex with seven other people, where she lived “still as a mouse” during the day for fear of being discovered, the classic teenage girl in Anne bubbled up. Oh, the fights she had with her mother! The aching of her growing body for a lover’s touch. The despair of feeling utterly alone in the world, that no one could really know her. And then her flashes of unexpected, unmitigated happiness, that she understood — she was more self-aware than I was at her age — had a lot to do with hormones.

“The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there’s a magnificent breeze and I’m longing — really longing — for everything: conversation, freedom, friends, being alone,” she wrote on Feb. 12, 1944. “I feel spring awakening. I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I’m longing for something.”

She was falling in love.

Of course, there is a much bigger story contained both in her diary and around its edges. She’d heard the stories of the concentration camps. She described nightmares about her friends who had been sent there. She considered herself lucky. “I keep seeing myself in your place,” she wrote of her friend Hanneli. “So why am I often miserable about what goes on here?”

But we know, reading her journal, what wretched fate awaited her.

People were aghast at Bieber, because Anne Frank is remembered as a victim of unimaginable atrocities who should be honoured. She was brave. She was thoughtful. But, in the end, she was also just a 15-year-old girl who wanted to live and love, like most beliebers.

To remember her that way is to remember her at her most human and powerful. She was like you. She was like me.

Hatred that’s nurtured and fanned and shrugged off as something to wait out — it murders regular people today, just as it did Anne Frank 70 years ago. Don’t let it.

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca

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